Swab Barcelona Art Fair
At Swab 2021, Andrea Festa Fine Art brings together the works of Sinead Breslin, Kottie Paloma, and Rafal Topolewski—three painters whose practices reflect a shared investment in emotional immediacy, fragmented figuration, and the psychological tensions of contemporary life. Their works channel a visual language that is both raw and refined, abstract and bodily, intuitive and deliberate. Through different registers—Breslin’s visceral, intimate distortions, Paloma’s explosive gestures and punk sensibility, and Topolewski’s surreal, melancholic spaces—the booth becomes a stage for unresolved emotions and fragmented narratives.
This presentation reflects the gallery’s mission to cultivate a program grounded in transnational dialogue, formal exploration, and ethical sensibility. Andrea Festa Fine Art operates as a platform for a new generation of artists who use painting not merely as a medium, but as a method for inquiry—into identity, power, memory, and embodiment.
Breslin’s large-scale oil paintings unfold as emotive terrains where intimacy, grief, and distortion entwine. In Anya at Home and Isabel Waiting (both 2020), figures emerge from painterly layers with haunting immediacy—simultaneously embodied and dissolving. Breslin’s work, included in public and private collections such as the Alex Katz Foundation, San Antonio Museum of Art, and X Museum Shanghai, balances compositional control with psychological disarray, exploring femininity, illness, and memory through a lens that is raw, poetic, and resolutely personal.
Paloma’s punk-inflected canvases Village, Bitch, Attitude and Village, Bitch, Idiot (both 2021) are propelled by urgency, satire, and gestural aggression. His practice combines raw humor with a tactile sensitivity, resulting in works that operate as both visual outbursts and cultural critique. Drawing from street culture, art brut, and text-based abstraction, Paloma’s paintings inhabit a liminal zone between language and emotion, humor and violence—offering a direct punch to both art historical tradition and contemporary malaise.
Banality, triviality, drawing, and architecture form the conceptual spine of Topolewski’s intuitive painting practice. His works—Eyes Between Chin, Lake, Neighbour, and Untitled (2019–2020)—resist temporal and spatial certainty, cultivating scenes of stillness and spectral ambiguity. Neither fully abstract nor wholly figurative, his paintings play with perception, light, and affect to elicit sensations of dispassionate longing and uncanny familiarity. With a background in both architecture and fine art, Topolewski constructs compositions that hover between coherence and dissonance, offering images that are hermetic, yet emotionally permeable.
